The best introduction to the work of Richard Howard can be found in the second poem in “Inner Voices” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 420 pages, $30), the new and long-awaited collection of his verse. “Sandusky-New York” shows us the young poet escaping his prosaic Ohio hometown by train:

Thus he would leave
The suburbs of his heart,
Would come to the capital city where it was.
The sun became as bright
Above him as the sight could bear.
He knew It then, that he would find
The fabulous city and the fact of seas
Already in his mind,
And only there: the landscape lived in him
As he might live in it.

The poem is moving in its vulnerable hopefulness: Mr. Howard’s journey follows the classic itinerary of the young artist, fleeing the dusty provinces for the glamours of the capital. Above all, this seems a French trajectory, the Paris-or-bust determination of Balzac’s Lucien de Rubempre, Stendhal’s Julien Sorel, and Flaubert’s Frederic Moreau. Yet Mr. Howard also acknowledges, in what seems a peculiarly American spirit, that the journey from Sandusky to New York is really a quest not for greater worldliness but for truer inwardness. “The fabulous city” is found, first of all, “in his mind”; it is only because he was born a metropolitan that the young Mr. Howard is des tined for the metropolis.

“Sandusky-New York” is an especially apt prologue to the life’s work documented in “Inner Voices” and in “Paper Trail” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 413 pages, $27), the new collection of Mr. Howard’s essays. With its embarrassed flight from “the clumsy body, where / He has before been always caught,” it shows us the caterpillar stage of a writer about to molt triumphantly into a rare, swift, parti-colored butterfly. For in the last half-century, no American poet has been more instinctively, elegantly cosmopolitan than Richard Howard. Again, the French parallel seems necessary: Just as Ford Madox Ford’s “The Good Soldier” was called the greatest French novel in the English language, so Mr. Howard deserves to be known as the greatest litterateur in America.

This is not just because Mr. Howard has been our leading translator of French literature, responsible for making or renewing America’s acquaintance with a whole galaxy of writers. (One section of “Paper Trail” collects his introductions to and essays on French literature: Barthes, Yourcenar, Gide, Daudet, and above all Proust.) Still more, it is a matter of Mr. Howard’s sense of the nature of literature and of the writer’s duties and pleasures. Most American writers are drawn to the unknown and the formless; they see themselves as Columbuses, scouting new spiritual and social geographies. At its worst, this tendency leads to the roughness, egotism, and unintelligence of so much American writing; at its best, it leads to the genuine strangeness and originality of Hawthorne and Melville, Whitman and Dickinson. But for good and ill, it has kept American literature from becoming what French literature so famously is: a cosmos, an ordered whole.

That wholeness is the quality Mr. Howard eulogizes, and interrogates, in his essay “Childhood Amnesia”: “At any given point of entry, the reader of this Literature has the encircling, often constricting awareness – has the conviction – that he is inside a completed structure. … The pride of it all, and the horror, is that it keeps going on, apparently able to assimilate whatever is proposed, even whatever is opposed.” Mr. Howard writes of the visitor’s sense that all of Paris is “really inside, somehow preposterously enclosed and housed in one enormous chamber, and a salon at that.” And the same is true of French literature, so venerable and courtly, so stylized and cunning, that it readily encloses and assimilates every new voice. It’s no accident that it was a French poet who wrote that “everything in the world exists to end up in a book,” and a French critic who declared “there is nothing outside the text.”

This conception of literature marks all of Mr. Howard’s many literary endeavors. One can see it, most obviously, in the introductions Mr. Howard has provided for many young poets. It may seem odd for Mr. Howard to gather 20 of these in the section of “Paper Trail” called “Introducing New Poets,” since such introductions are seldom intended to stand alone. But Mr. Howard’s introductions are more than utilitarian objects: They are fantastically ornate and courtly performances, rituals whereby the maestro welcomes the novice into the “enormous chamber” of literature. Often one wonders, reading these brief pieces, what their ostensible beneficiaries must have made of them: When Mr. Howard descants on a poet named Turner Cassity by praising “Cassity’s capacity, Cassity’s veracity, Cassity’s sagacity,” it is clear that we are not in the realm of criticism, but of jouissance.

But it is Mr. Howard’s poetry that best demonstrates his grandly sociable sense of literature. For Mr. Howard, poetry is not a Bloomianagon (that deeply American metaphor for literary inheritance) but a causerie of master spirits across time and space. The majority of the poems in “Inner Voices” are responses to other poems, other artworks, other lives; when Mr. Howard is not meditating on a Nadar photograph or a Donatello sculpture, he is assuming the voice of John Ruskin, Edith Wharton, or others among the famous dead. No English-language poet since Browning has devoted himself so exclusively to the traditional dramatic monologue. No wonder some of Mr. Howard’s best poems are responses to Browning – whether he is assuming the voice of the aged poet in “November, 1889,” or slyly rewriting “My Last Duchess” in “Nikolaus Mardruz to His Master Ferdinand, Count of Tyrol.” In this poem, spoken by the addressee of Browning’s famous monologue, Mr. Howard’s Nikolaus deflates the menacing bluster of Browning’s Duke:

His Grace chooses “never to stoop” when he makes reproof…
My Lord will take this as but a figure:
not only is the Duke
no longer young, his body is so
Squeerly misshapen
that even to speak
of “not stooping” seems absurdity:
the creature is stooped

Here, as usual, Mr. Howard’s stanzas are themselves “queerly” shaped: His intricately patterned syllabic lines twist down the page like a DNA molecule rolled flat. It is the perfect visual corollary to Mr. Howard’s language, which is always baroque, periphrastic, Jamesian. As he writes in an essay on “The Resonance of Henry James in American Poetry,” Mr. Howard has learned from James that “language, poetic language say, is what it does: that the saying of something can be enacted by its movement in the sentence.” What Mr. Howard sacrifices to attain this sinuosity is just the quality that has been the pride and blazon of American poetry during most of his career: the passionately authentic. Mr. Howard’s poems smell of the lamp, unabashedly so; one cannot forget the stack of biographies, letters, and diaries that must have been consumed in the plotting of vignettes of Victorian or Second Empire literary life. The dramatic monologue has long been a staple of modern poetry, but most often the poet creates a fictional surrogate in his own distorted image: Eliot’s Prufrock, Berryman’s Henry. To fully appreciate Mr. Howard’s “The Lesson of the Master,” on the other hand, one must know almost as much about Edith Wharton, Henry James, and their circle as Mr. Howard himself: these are exercises in resurrection, not self-expression. “I don’t like direct self-expression,” he once told an interviewer, “and all the work that I do is some kind of invocation of or transaction with others, whether it’s criticism, translation, or poetry.”

Still, it is the moments of self-expression in “Inner Voices” that make the deepest and most lasting impression. Perhaps the most extraordinary poem in the book is “Howard’s Way,” whose subtitle – “A Letter to 102 Boulevard Haussmann” – indicates that it takes the form of a message to Marcel Proust, one of Mr. Howard’s chief gods. Yet the poem recounts a moment of troubling challenge to Proust and his aesthetic of observation. Invited to a party at the Dakota, Mr. Howard finds that a group of men are watching a child-pornography film: “On the screen, persons inconceivably wound / around each other commit by noose and knout / actions of ecstasy and passions of pain / on a hairless Oriental boy, a child!”

For Proust, the sexual cruelty of the Baron de Charlus was a fact to be observed and recorded, part of the data of life. But Mr. Howard finds that he cannot face this comparable outrage with a novelist’s equanimity, and instead he flees the apartment. “You / take your part by holding your peace,” he reproaches Proust; “You are not / there, you are silent – have you left me?” It is at such moments, when this supreme adept of literature cries out against his god like Jesus on the Cross, that Mr. Howard’s poetry is most alive. In his doubt and aporia, more even than in his fluency, Mr. Howard demonstrates the potency of the formula he enunciates in a late poem: “Make / it new out of old makings.”